> What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.

It's critical mass. I didn't want my 13-year-old daughter on social media, because even 7 years ago we knew the harms. We were firm, and we kept her off it. The problem was that we were attempting to help her with her mental health, but when you're literally the only kid who didn't read the group chat from your friend group the night before, that does remarkable damage to your mental health. It cuts off an enormous part of their social life.

If the majority of kids weren't using it then it'd be easy, but because it's their primary form of communication, it's incredibly difficult.

Do you think there could be explicitly child-friendly social media? I don't know how you'd get past the network effect, but could it work? Maybe adults would have to set up groups, and connections could only be established with Bluetooth or something to ensure physical proximity (yes you could cheat but you'd need weird hardware or software to do so).

Adults setting up groups would be so that you could have a group for "year 11 maths class" but not for "people who hate susan"

It'd be fine if they were just using chat apps. It's not the communication that's the problem, or the bullying. That's going to happen regardless, and it's nothing new to online spaces. If anything, having online spaces available is helpful, because kids who are excluded at school are able to find places they fit in online. It's the algorithmic feeds and short-form video content. It's flooding their brains in their most formative time.

I think being contacted by or contacting strangers is also a separate concern. Bullying is also a problem.

Strangers are fine. It's strangers in social contexts where strangers can do harm that's the problem. An unsupervised 8-year-old on Hacker News isn't going to get groomed; an 8-year-old on Snapchat might well be.

That's because on HN everyone could see the grooming and call it out - there are no direct messages or private groups.

If you draw a firm boundary with that contributor, and they continue to push, ban them.

"This doesn't meet the standards of our project for reason xyz. Please refrain from submitting further PRs that do not adhere to our contribution guidelines outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md."

If they continue, ban them.

You'll need an iPhone to manage it. It's the same with managing an iPad's Family Sharing settings. Need another Apple device to manage it properly.

Perhaps this is true if Erica is 16, but if Erica is 10 then I would like to be notified if she doesn't make it to school safely.

Who are you to say what is okay? She's not your child.

Yes its unlikely something bad would happen. It's also unlikely that you would get into a life threatening car accident. But you still wear a seatbelt. Why? Because it's the precautionary principle, pretty much common sense.

Yes in the past we let children wander, but if you asked those parents in the past if there was some very low cost way to afford additional security like knowing where your 10 year old is, they would obviously take it. But for some reason people take the wrong lessons from the past.

I find the current recommendations from spotify or youtube music don't actually help me find new music very well. They just end up shoehorning me, instead of widening my options.

That's not necessarily true. Who's to say the security researchers wouldn't have found it if they'd searched the code manually?

It's an AI security firm! You might just as productively ask "why did all the other engineers who ever looked at this code not find it, and why was Theori the one to actually surface it?".

It would have taken a LOT longer but often this kind of manual search is so tedious people just don't do it. LLMs don't get bored.

> LLMs don't get bored

They do not get bored like a human but they are trained on human language and replicate the same traits, such as laziness, and expressing boredom or annoyance (even if obviously they do not experience anything at all). It’s actually a lot of effort to get them to engage with things at a deeper level without skipping corners

I’m hardly going to simp for LLM tools but the fact that the bug existed and no one had reported it seems proof positive no one was about to find it without them

My (extensive) experience with LLM code generation is that it has the same issues you describe in your field. Hallucinations, over-engineering, misses important requirements/patterns.

But engineers have these same problems. The key is that the content creator (engineers for codegen, doctors for medicine) is still responsible for the output of the AI, as if they wrote it themselves. If they make a mistake with an AI (eg, include false data - hallucinations), they should be held accountable in the same way they would if they made a mistake without it.

Okay but since we know how humans actually behave, they will fully trust the indeterministic machine and give away their thinking. Sadly there is a large swath of humans that will act like this, maybe 20-30%.

Are you willing to put your life in the hands of these people fully using the machines to do everything?

Acting like that smart people aren't getting one shot'ed by these machines is very dangerous. Even worse is how quickly your skills actual degrade. If knew my doctor was using anything LLM related, I would switch doctors.

Which is exactly why LLMs use these techniques so often. They're very common.

Well, em dashes are not all that common in text that people have written on computers, because em dashes were left out of ASCII. They're common in high-quality text like Wikipedia, academic papers, and published books.

My guess is that comma-separated lists tend to be a feature of text that is attempting to be either comprehensively expository—listing all the possibilities, all the relevant factors, etc.—or persuasive—listing a compelling set of examples or other supporting arguments so that at least one of them is likely to convince the reader.

I was surprised to learn from your comment that em dashes were left out of ASCII, because I thought I've been using them extensively in my writing. Perhaps I'm just relying heavily on the hyphen key. I mention that because it's likely instances of true em dash use (e.g. in the high-quality text you cite) and hyphen usage by people like me are close enough together in a vector space that the general pattern of a little horizontal line in the middle of a sentence is perceived as a common writing style by the LLMs.

I find myself constantly editing my natural writing style to sound less like an AI so this discussion of em dash use is a sore spot. Personally I think many people overrate their ability to recognize AI-generated copy without a good feedback loop of their own false positives (or false negatives for that matter).

On typewriters all characters are the same width, typically about ½em wide. Some of them compromised their hyphen so that you could join two of them together to form an em dash, but a good hyphen is closer to ¼em wide. But that compromise also meant that a single hyphen would work very well as an en dash. And generally hyphenation was not very important for typewriters because you couldn't produce properly justified text on a typewriter anyway, not without carefully preplanning each line before you began to type it.

Computers unfortunately inherited a lot of this typewriter crap.

Related compromises included having only a single " character; shaping it so that it could serve as a diaeresis if overstruck; shaping some apostrophes so that they could serve as either left or write single quotes and also form a decent ! if overstruck with a .; alternatively, shaping apostrophe so that it could serve as an acute accent if overstruck, and providing a mirror-image left-quote character that doubled as a grave accent; and shaping the lowercase "l" as a viable digit "1", which more or less required the typewriter as a whole to use lining figures rather than the much nicer text figures.

Is there a specific definition for intelligence?

What definition are you using to say chimps don't have human level intelligence?

By any useful definition, the intelligence of human ancestors very closely resembled that of chimps for about 4 million years after the human and chimp lineages diverged. While it's impossible to say for certain, that's around the time that endocranial volumes started growing consistently beyond the range seen in chimps. That is also around the time of the first evidence of stone tool making.

Like life, many sources define it differently.

You should always have an architecture in mind. But it should be appropriate for the scale and complexity of your application _right now_, as opposed to what you imagine it will be in five years. Let it evolve, but always have it.